(Note: On Oct. 16, at the third and final debate of
the 2006 Michigan gubernatorial campaign, candidates Jennifer Granholm and Dick
DeVos were asked for their views on the notion of banning smoking in all places
patronized by the public. Below is a commentary on this very issue by Mackinac
Center President Lawrence W. Reed. It appears this month as the latest
installment of his "Ideas and Consequences" column in The Freeman, the journal
of the
Foundation for Economic Education.)

A few months ago, I walked into a restaurant in Naples,
Fla., and said "A nonsmoking table for two, please." The greeter replied, "No
problem. All restaurants in Florida are nonsmoking by law. Follow me."

For a brief moment as we walked to our table, I thought to
myself: "Good. No chance of even a whiff of a cigarette. I like that!"

Stay Engaged

Receive our weekly emails!

email address

And then I felt shame. I had fallen victim to the statist
impulse. For 40 years, I thought I was a passionate, uncompromising believer in
the free society. Yet for a few seconds, I took pleasure in government trampling on the liberties of consenting adults in a private setting.

This incident troubled me enough to think about it a long
while. I wanted to know why my first instinct was to abandon principles for a
little convenience. And if a committed freedom-lover like me can be so easily
tugged in the wrong direction, what does that say for ever getting nonbelievers
to eschew similar or more egregious temptations?

At first, I thought about the harm that many doctors
believe secondhand smoke can do. Perhaps it wasn’t wrong for government to
protect nonsmokers if what we have here is a case of one person imposing a
harmful externality on an unwilling other. Then I quickly realized two things:
no one compelled me to enter the place, and the restaurant belonged
to neither the government nor me. The plain fact is that in a genuinely free
society, a private owner who wants to allow some people in his establishment to
smoke has as much right to permit it as you or I have to go elsewhere. It’s not
as though people aren’t aware of the risks involved. Moreover, no one has a right to compel another citizen to provide him with a smoke-free restaurant.

Besides, I can think of a lot of risky behaviors in which
many adults freely engage but which I would never call upon government to ban:
sky diving and bungee jumping being just two of them. Statistics show that
merely attending or teaching in certain inner city government schools is pretty
risky too — and maybe more so than occasionally inhaling somebody’s smoke.

The statist impulse is a preference for deploying the force
of the state to achieve some benefit — real or imagined, for one’s self or
others — over voluntary alternatives such as persuasion, education or free
choice. If people saw the options in such stark terms, or if they realized the
slippery slope they’re on when they endorse government intervention, support for
resolving matters through force would likely diminish. The problem is, they
frequently fail to equate intervention with force. But that is precisely what’s
involved, is it not? The state government in Florida did not request that
restaurants forbid smoking; it ordered them to under threat of fines and
imprisonment.

I tried this reasoning on some of my friends. Except for
the diehard libertarians, here were some typical attitudes and how they were
expressed:

Delusion: "It’s not really ‘force’ if a majority of
citizens support it."

Paternalism: "In this instance, force was a positive
thing because it was for your own good."

Dependency: "If government won’t do it, who will?"

Myopia: "You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.
How can banning smoking in restaurants possibly be a threat to liberty? If it
is, it’s so minor that it doesn’t matter."

Impatience: "I don’t want to wait until my favorite
restaurant gets around to banning it on its own."

Power lust: "Restaurants that won’t keep smoke out
have to be told to do it."

Self-absorption: "I just don’t care. I hate smoke
and I don’t want to chance smelling it even if a restaurant owner puts the
smokers in their own section."

On a larger scale, every one of these arguments can be
employed — indeed, they are invariably employed — to justify shackling a
people with intolerable limitations on their liberties. If there’s one thing we
must learn from the history of regimes, it is that you give them an inch and
sooner or later, by appealing to popular weaknesses, they will take a mile. The
trick is getting people to understand that liberty is more often eaten away
one small bite at a time than in one big gulp, and that it’s wiser to resist
liberty’s erosion in small things than it is to concede and hope that bigger
battles won’t have to be fought later.

Delusion, paternalism, dependency, myopia, impatience,
power lust and self-absorption: All are reasons people succumb to the statist
impulse. As I pondered this, it occurred to me that they are also vestiges of
infantile thinking. As children or adolescents, our understanding of how the
world works is half-baked at best. We expect others to provide for us and don’t
much care how they get what they give us. And we want it now.

We consider ourselves "adults" when we learn there are
boundaries beyond which our behavior should not tread; when we think of the
long run and all people instead of just ourselves and the here and now; when we
make every effort to be as independent as our physical and mental abilities
allow; when we leave others alone unless they threaten us; and when we patiently
satisfy our desires through peaceful means rather than with a club. We consider
ourselves "adults" when we embrace personal responsibility; we revert to
infantile behavior when we shun it.

Yet survey the landscape of American political debate these
days and you find no end to the demands to utilize the force of the state to "do
something." Tax the other guy because he has more than me. Give me a tariff so I
can be relieved of my foreign competition. Subsidize my college education. Swipe
that property so I can put a hotel on it. Fix this or that problem for me, and
fix it pronto. Make my life easier by making somebody else pay. Tell that guy
who owns a restaurant that he can’t serve people who want to smoke.

I wonder if America has become a giant nursery, full of
screaming babies who see the state as their loving nanny. It makes me want to
say, "Grow up!"

Societies rise or fall depending on how civil its citizens
are. The more they respect each other and associate freely, the safer and more
prosperous they are. The more they rely on force — legal or not — the more
pliant they are in the hands of demagogues and tyrants. So resisting the statist
impulse is no trivial issue.

In my mind, resisting that impulse is nothing less than the
adult thing to do.

#####

Lawrence W. Reed is president of the Mackinac Center for
Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland,
Mich.